First Into Nagasaki (33 page)

By the night of September 3, Burchett’s colleague Henry Keys had been moved, along with the rest of the Allied press, to a drab Yokohama hotel. On two attempts to reach Tokyo he was hauled off the train by U.S. military police. Improvising, Keys hired (cigarettes and food, as usual) a local journalist to await the Morse transmission at the Domei offices.

By now Burchett had left Hiroshima and was on his way back by train.

Late that night the Japanese journalist banged on Keys’s hotel-room door, Burchett’s dispatch in hand. Keys rushed it over to the press center for transmission. The duty clerk assessed the dateline and insisted the story had to clear the censors.
Why,
Keys demanded,
since the war is over now?
—only to be told it was a special case, and could not be sent without approval.

Keys, another resourceful Aussie, snarled his way from officer to officer over the duty clerk’s telephone, waking them up and climbing the ranks until finally someone “was glad to yield.” It helped that the story was for a non-U.S. newspaper. Keys stood over the cable operator until the
Daily Express
acknowledged that every word had reached London.

Weller was now (the morning of September 4) airborne, en route in a DC-3 south to Kanoya with sizable troop transports. He would stay there all that day, file three long dispatches, then slip off in darkness.

On September 5 England’s largest-circulation daily carried Burchett’s story on the front page. His editor astutely offered free worldwide reprint rights. In the United States, no newspaper bothered with it.

Burchett took his time returning; near Kyoto, and on Honshu, he visited several prison camps. He reached the capital on the morning of September 7, not yet aware how very unpopular he had become. Tokyo, reduced in many parts to fire-ravaged debris, was now occupied by U.S. troops.

By this time Weller had spent a full day in Nagasaki, written his first dispatch late into the night, and sent it north by
kempeitai
to MacArthur’s censors. His note at the bottom, requesting radio acknowledgment from two fellow
Chicago Daily News
men in Tokyo, implies that he felt someone might need to help slide or bully the dispatch through official channels, and that he presumed the press center’s cable operator would contact them.

Burchett, unwashed, exhausted, ran into a colleague at the train station who urged him to come straight to the Imperial Hotel. A press conference had been called by the top brass to eviscerate his article about radiation sickness.

Burchett got to the formal rite in time to hear General Thomas Farrell, deputy chief of the Manhattan Project and its head man in the Pacific—who one month prior had overseen bomb preparations on the island of Tinian—explain how both atomic devices were “exploded at a specifically calculated altitude to exclude any possibility of residual radioactivity.” Therefore, the symptoms Burchett described were either blast burns or sloppy reporting.

Burchett, feeling rather scruffy amid the uniforms and medals, asked tersely if Farrell had actually been to Hiroshima. Aha, he had not. After a scientist-versus-layman argument that ended with Burchett challenging the Army general on why, if all he claimed were true, fish died within seconds of entering a stretch of Hiroshima’s river, the correspondent received the closing admonition of a press briefing enacted to disprove him: “I’m afraid you’ve fallen victim to Japanese propaganda.”

Conspiratorial as it sounds, afterward Burchett was spirited away to a U.S. Army hospital for medical tests, which showed that his white corpuscle count was down—“a typical symptom of radiation sickness,” he comments sourly in a memoir, though the doctors pretended otherwise. On his release he found that his camera containing a film shot in Hiroshima was gone from his belongings, as was the carbon of his story. As was his press accreditation: MacArthur ordered Burchett expelled from Japan for “having gone beyond the boundaries of military occupation.” This proved futile once the objection was raised that he was still under the umbrella of Admiral Nimitz, based on Guam. The Navy, eager to seize an opportunity to simultaneously annoy both the Army and MacArthur, delightedly reaccredited him.

The point was not that nearly a hundred thousand Japanese might have died on a Monday morning from a sole bomb; more had died during a single night’s incendiary raid over Tokyo in March (as Weller described in detail in an August 31 dispatch passed by censors, though never published by his newspaper). Indeed, napalm had been developed to aid those firebombings. Nor was the point that many of the atomic-burned would never recover. The priority for the military, the government, and the American people was to end the war as soon as possible against a merciless enemy who had, after all, started it. Few in the United States in 1945 had lost sight of the fact that the Pacific war was entirely Japan’s doing; that their schoolmates and brothers had died of gunfire trying to capture some coral atoll in the Gilberts (as Weller phrased it once), rather than at Key West of old age.

No, the point to be carefully disproved and silenced was what Burchett called
the atomic plague
and Weller called
Disease X.
The city wasteland of Hiroshima that Burchett portrayed, far more devastated than what Weller saw in Nagasaki, was not what provoked a damage-control U.S. military press conference thirty-six hours after the article appeared, with editors round the world screaming through the cable wires for every reporter in Yokohama to get down to the nuclear sites and see for themselves. What provoked the official denials was Burchett’s claim of a deadly radiation that confirmed the many Japanese rumors and reports—the invisible death that after a month had still not gone away. Suppose it lasted even longer? Suppose it hung around for the U.S. servicemen who were soon to occupy Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Suppose it drifted over the nearby POWs awaiting liberation? A lingering cloud of radioactivity floating in the wrong direction (like after the July 16, 1945, New Mexico test) was a lethal liability.

Weller’s timing was perfect: his first dispatch from Nagasaki probably reached Tokyo on the heels of that press conference, either late the night of September 7 or the next morning. Worst of all, Weller—whose reputation was as every politician’s nightmare, a bulldog who, once he got his nose in the doorway, was not backing down—was still in Nagasaki, unstoppably typing away. The U.S. military had an idea what he would find out if he stayed there. And he did: the next evening the Tokyo censors received four more stories from him, including descriptions of Allied POW camps that lay directly under the blast, with prisoners killed as a result. His dispatches, already enough to fill a week’s front pages in Chicago and in sixty-plus syndicate newspapers for starters, never stood a chance.

(When U.S. forces finally entered Hiroshima and confirmed Japanese reports that several American POWs were killed by the bomb, the news was covered up. Families were informed only that their loved ones had died in Japan. The facts were not revealed until 1977, when War Department files from the occupation were declassified. Even then the Pentagon denied it.)

There had already been one important Hiroshima article to vindicate the U.S. government and subtly contradict Burchett. It appeared the same day, September 5, in the
New York Times.
This was by Bill Lawrence, who wrote as W. H. Lawrence (and not to be confused, as so many historians have done, with William L. Laurence, long-standing science writer for the
Times,
known to colleagues as “Atomic Bill”).

Lawrence (1916–1972)—who inevitably was called “Non-Atomic Bill”—was a brash young reporter who would later be a buddy of Jack Kennedy and spend the last decade of his career with ABC News. He’d covered Moscow for two years and glimpsed the war in the Pacific before being invited along on this junket. Via Tex’s airborne transmission equipment, he managed to speed his article home. Its thrust was to confirm U.S. strength. Lawrence called Hiroshima “the world’s worst-damaged city . . . the final proof of what the mechanical and scientific genius of America has been able to accomplish in war.” Without apparently entering a hospital, he referred—less markedly than Burchett—to “the other physical ailments of the bombs” and quoted Japanese doctors, who “told us that persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86% of their white blood corpuscles, their hair began to drop out, they lost appetites, vomited blood and finally died.” (Lawrence later claimed he
did
go to the hospitals; if so, this was not in the article as published.) But a week afterward, rather curiously—and despite encountering Weller in Nagasaki, who had interviewed Japanese doctors in depth about Disease X—Lawrence wrote: “I am convinced that, horrible as the bomb undoubtedly is, the Japanese are exaggerating its effects . . . .”

Among all the junketeers Homer Bigart of the
Herald Tribune,
a reporter’s reporter, was probably the most trenchant. On the same day as the Burchett and Lawrence articles, he called the bomb “a weapon far more terrible and deadly than poison gas.” He described the effects, related by Japanese doctors, of death by radiation, but without using the dreaded word.

As a result of the press junket,
Life
magazine would decide that while a few in Hiroshima had perished from exposure to radiation right when the bomb exploded, no Japanese “died from radioactivity afterward.”
Time
was more skeptical, pointing out that “In a week when the first U.S. newsmen entered Hiroshima . . . and made plain the appalling devastation . . . the State Department issued a formal report on atrocities committed by the Japanese. The timing was not missed by many readers.”

Up till now MacArthur had been largely kept out of the atomic loop, forbidden to make any statements questioning the necessity of the bomb. His plans involved a leisurely three-month timetable for occupying southern Japan. He was furious at this press caravan flown over from Washington and outside his control. He considered court-martialing all of the reporters and officers involved for traveling outside the occupation zone and risking an incident with the Japanese; instead he cut off gas supplies to any planes that might repeat the transgression. The junket was forced to drag a lieutenant general over from Guam to requisition fuel to keep their B-17s flying.

The press junket ran counter to MacArthur’s interests to the degree that anyone who disobeyed him was profoundly annoying. Their reporting would inevitably enshrine the effectiveness of the atomic bomb at the expense of his own importance. Plus it got all the other journalists yelping about when they might see Hiroshima and Nagasaki for themselves, which only solidified his determination to keep a lid on the two cities and a firmer grip on Japanese censorship. The junket did, however, run parallel to his interests to the degree that it would create, in a home readership, a sensation of earned and absolute power in American hands over Japanese lives—of which MacArthur was now the supreme instrument.

Some historians, from the moral high ground of the present, have laid all sorts of collectively Byzantine accusations upon this U.S. military press junket. As Burchett puts it, the reporters had been selected “to participate in a great cover-up conspiracy, although some of them may not have realized this at the time.” Weller saw them as hasty day-trippers, like “yacht passengers who have stopped to buy basketry on an island.” They seem to have made no serious effort to investigate claims of deaths by radiation, and by the time they were whisked into Nagasaki they certainly had no excuse of ignorance. Although Burchett beat them into Hiroshima by only a few hours, his article has an utterly different flavor than theirs, partly because he was able to see the whole situation through Nakamura’s experienced eyes, and partly because he was not there as a guest of the conquering government.

In any case, the U.S. Army went rapidly into a public relations spin cycle. They’d hoped to keep both nuclear sites virginal from the Allied press, but suddenly reporters, monitored or not, were thick on the ground in one of them. General Farrell, the day after his press conference excoriating Burchett, and hoping to counter alert Japanese diplomatic efforts abroad to present the bombs as a crime against humanity, took a research team of eleven scientists down to Hiroshima to see for himself (September 8). One member later stated he was openly told by Farrell that their mission was “to prove that there was no radioactivity from the bomb.”

Meanwhile George Weller was still in Nagasaki, sending up dispatches to the censors’ wastebaskets. On September 9, after having the story to himself for three days, he was upended by the junket’s arrival—though his reception by McCrary & Co. was warmer than what they gave Burchett. Maybe this was because they expected him to be there; and once they let him know how furious MacArthur was at his relentless articles, Tex (“kindness itself,” as Weller recalled) offered to send all his dispatches once airborne. Was this because Weller was American, not Australian? Or was it to control the stories? Yet Weller never discerned ulterior motives in Tex’s offer. It seems more likely that the junket and its officers, having been denied fuel for their planes and even threatened with court-martial, were fed up with MacArthur’s posturing, and saw Weller not as a competitor but as an ally. What did it matter, since they’d already published their Hiroshima stories? They could not guess at all he had seen that they had not, and he would speak of them only as cohorts who’d evaded MacArthur’s blackout more adeptly than he.

Their encounter begs the question of whether Weller admitted to himself that MacArthur’s reputed anger meant his stories were not getting through. If MacArthur’s censorship had something of the personal vendetta about it, then Weller’s refusal to seize the opportunity he was offered also carries a bit of the stubbornness of a feud. Clearly the press junket stopped him in his tracks; no dispatch by Weller written the evening of September 9 survives. The next day he temporarily gave up on Nagasaki. As he later wrote, “Then [i.e., once the junket left] I heard of an unopened prison camp at Omuta, full of human derelicts. I went there and found a strange group of awed prisoners who had seen two mushroom clouds on the horizon . . . .”